In the fall of 2017, Game of Thrones star Lena Headey was among dozens of women to accuse former Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual harassment and assault. Now, in a new interview with the Sunday Times, Headey is speaking out about how rejecting Weinstein may have ended up harming her career for a decade.
Headey, who plays Cersei Lannister on the HBO program, publicly shared her Weinstein story in a series of tweets in October of 2017. She wrote that she first met Weinstein at the Venice Film Festival, where he made sexually inappropriate comments. Years later, she says he manhandled her during a meeting in L.A. after she turned down his advances. “I got in my car and I cried,” she tweeted.
Speaking with the Times, Headey says that she has realized that rejecting Weinstein had a negative impact on her career. “After he was discovered to be a slimeball, on a grander scale than me just knowing it, I did start thinking, ‘Fuck, maybe because I didn’t shag him, that’s impacted a decade of my working life,’” she told the Times. “Because I did two jobs for Miramax before those incidents, and after that there was nothing.”
Headey is among many women who have come forward to accuse Weinstein of harassing or assaulting them when he was a power player in Hollywood. The allegations led to a major reckoning in Hollywood and other industries, as a number of powerful men have since been accused of sexual misconduct. Weinstein currently faces five counts for allegedly nonconsensual encounters with two women, and has a Manhattan court date set for May.
